Kendall, Henry Way
Kendall, Henry Way (1926-1999), an American physicist, shared the 1990 Nobel Prize in physics with Richard Edward Taylor and Jerome Isaac Friedman for confirming the existence of quarks, the basic building blocks of matter.
A graduate of Amherst College (1950), Kendall earned his doctorate in nuclear and atomic physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) (1954). As a research assistant at Stanford University, he met Taylor and Friedman. Their collaboration between 1967 and 1973 made use of the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center's two-mile- (3.2-kilometer-) long particle accelerator. Directing highly energetic beams of electrons at targets containing liquid hydrogen, the collaborators showed that the protons that make up hydrogen nuclei have structure inside them. Their results implied that protons and the neutrons are not fundamental particles of matter. Instead, the results confirmed that these subatomic particles are made up of hard, electrically charged, pointlike particles, now called quarks. The laureates were cited for their breakthrough in our understanding of matter.
After teaching at Stanford (1956–1961), Kendall joined the faculty of MIT. In 1969, Kendall helped found the Union of Concerned Scientists. He served as its chairman from 1974 until his death in 1999. Kendall opposed President Ronald Reagan's Space Defense Initiative, objecting to the idea that such a Star Wars system could protect American cities from nuclear attack. In 1997, Kendall was among the scientists to brief President Bill Clinton about the threat of global warming due to build-up of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere.
His social concerns were reflected in his books Energy Strategies: Toward a Solar Future (1980), Beyond the Freeze: The Road to Nuclear Sanity (1982), and The Fallacy of Star Wars (1984).
Kendall died while on an underwater photography shoot with a team from National Geographic magazine in Wakulla Springs, Florida.